Utterly off topic, but what the hell. Samson posted something on his personal blog (he can reference it if he wants) that made me wonder…

History tell us that there are a number of conspiracy theories that wound up being true, such as the CIA mind control studies (MKULTRA) and Watergate. Of course there are also the juicy ones like Aliens, JFK, various Secret Societies, the Moon landing, etc.

How many of you think that any of the popular conspiracy theories hold water? Do you know of any conspiracy theories that you happen to agree with?

Obviously, this subject could go bad REAL quick, so PLEASE BE NICE. A brief explanation as to why/why not will do. We're all allowed to believe what we want, and to wonder. Remember, just because you can't prove it doesn't make it false. So um, be nice!

I personally don't put a lot of weight in conspiracies, and even if some have been true, it wouldn't matter the original person who came up with it, or came out with it, has already been branded a 'tard, and a crazy.

The only one that holds any weight with me is the moon landing. And anyone who's been to Iceland and seen a couple of the fields there where the ash and rocks from eruptions has landed can tell that it could entirely have been filmed there. That is after all, where NASA trained the astronauts for the moon landing anyway.

It deals with the possibility that the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic was actually a front for a top secret military mission to find out what happened to a pair of US submarines in the 1960s during the height of the Cold War. Something about the whole thing doesn't ring true to me, even though I know full well the government is capable of it.

My obvious favorite conspiracy theory is the Roswell incident in 1947. The prevailing story that's still popular today is that it was a crashed alien spaceship recovered in the New Mexico desert just outside of Roswell. It made the papers and everything, and then suddenly the Air Force swoops in to have it covered up. The Air Force explanation for it was a crashed weather balloon. Hogwash. I say they found SOMETHING out there they just didn't want us to know about. Whether that's an alien spaceship or just an uber-secret experiment that failed badly we'll never know. They've kept it covered up for so long now all we can do is speculate. Most of the people involved are dead now. It's been 60 years and we still have no idea what really happened there, and in another 60 nobody will care.

LOL, i know i'm going to get shot for this one, "I know that aliens exist and do probing experiments on people" because today i woke up with a sore butt. Ok, now on a more serious note, i cannot think of any particular conspiracy theory that i feel holds much weight under the light of reason.

Thinking of popular culture figures, Marylin Munroe, Elvis, Jim Morrison, Princess Dianna et al, they all have wild theories and speculations about their respective deaths. Sure they had unusual circumstances that led to their deaths, but a hell of a lot of ordinary people die in the most unusual of ways. I think the reason why pop culture figures end up with such whacked out speculations is due to their fan bases not wanting to accept the actualities of the deaths and come up with wild speculations based on the fragments of evidence that the media. Mostly because they have a need to know why or a need to rationalize what for the most part is pure tragedy.

My obvious favorite conspiracy theory is the Roswell incident in 1947. The prevailing story that's still popular today is that it was a crashed alien spaceship recovered in the New Mexico desert just outside of Roswell. It made the papers and everything, and then suddenly the Air Force swoops in to have it covered up. The Air Force explanation for it was a crashed weather balloon. Hogwash. I say they found SOMETHING out there they just didn't want us to know about. Whether that's an alien spaceship or just an uber-secret experiment that failed badly we'll never know. They've kept it covered up for so long now all we can do is speculate. Most of the people involved are dead now. It's been 60 years and we still have no idea what really happened there, and in another 60 nobody will care.

Yeah i like this one too, personally i think its all a lode of phooey, cooked up by some peyote smoking whack jobs. If anything at all happened in Roswell i think it would be most plausible that it was a failed Air Force experiment that was covered up and not an alien. I do tho believe that there is alien life out there somewhere, just that currently there is no credible scientific evidence to support such claims.

Most conspiracy theories imply that someone, somewhere, has a malicious motive to cover something up. I personally subscribe to the maxim "never attribute to malice what can be accounted for by incompetence." Moreover, Occam's Razor tends to do a nice job slicing up most conspiracy theories.

I kind of like the theory that Marylin Monroe was murdered, but I won't go into the specific details here… the Philadelphia experiment and mkultra and Roswell all seem reasonable enough to me.. I'm rather fond of the theory that Elvis simply went home amongst other such fun ones, though I don't believe any of them for a second. *shrug*

There's a forums for this sort of thing at Conspiracies & Myths that I followed pretty actively until very recently, if you sign up, tell 'em Conner sent ya'. :wink:

One thing you have to remember about Roswell is that the alleged crash took place in 1947, but that no one started talking about it until 1978.

Now, those of you who are actually old enough for the question to be meaningful, how accurately can you remember the details of something that happened over thirty years ago? Can you be sure abou exact dates? What about something that happened 40 or even 50 years ago? Roswell is a prime example of myth-formation. People remember two or more separate incidents as if they were a single event (or vice versa). Some people are outright frauds or publicity-seekers. Those who collect witness accounts completely ignore the ones that contradict whatever their pet theory is. And so on.

Personally I'm quite happy with the explanation that what originally came down was a balloon from Project Mogul (see, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_r... ) - I doubt that alien spaceships are really held together with sticky tape.

The amount of effort that would have been required to fake the moon landings that convincingly would have been greater than the amount of effort involved in actually sending someone to the moon. How do you account for the ability of Jodrell Bank to monitor the Eagle lander's progress as it neared the surface? How do you account for the fact that, to this day, scientists are using a reflector placed on the moon by the Apollo astronauts to bounce a laser beam off, and thus measure the distance to the moon with greater accuracy than was possible prior to the landings?

In light of Phoenix's recent Mars landings, one would think that one would be vastly more skeptical of moving such a sophisticated robot all the way to Mars than just hopping over to the moon, a much easier and shorter trip in the scale of things.

So, meh, conspiracy, shmapiracy. What Exeter said about not blaming on malice but on stupidity or incompetence. :wink: (That said, I actually don't buy the Occam's razor argument that much since often the whole point of a well-designed cover-up or what-have-you is to make the simplest (but incorrect) explanation be the most plausible.)